


soothing, in the finite waves, our infinities

by GreyFey



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, But It's Going To Be Fine, F/F, I swear to god I'm not ending this too badly, Reevaluating one's life choices, Romance, Sex, also
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 22:50:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14778770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyFey/pseuds/GreyFey
Summary: It's an itch beneath her skin, a tortuous pull in her gut. Obsession, some would call it, but she's not sure it's all that appropriate to the situation anymore. It's a pulsing, living thing that has grown too big for concepts anyone can put words to. Too big for the confines of her chest, even. Ready to burst free into the world.Or: Eve helps Villanelle out of prison. AU from1x06.





	soothing, in the finite waves, our infinities

**Author's Note:**

> So. I've been having Feelings since Konstantin betrayed our favourite psychopath.  
> (i.e. screaming in my head for the past few weeks)  
> And this is the result.  
> Welcome to the ride.

Blood drips down, oozes lazily towards hard, frozen ground. It slithers, indolent, across tan skin as though it's got all the time in the world, a macabre river of shiny, shocking _red._ Her hands are wet with it. She can't stop looking at them, fingers flexing, cracking open what little of it has begun to coagulate. It feels sticky, like it's going to cling to her flesh until the day she dies, until muscle and sinew flake from her bones, take all trace of it deep into the soil.

_For you were made from dust, and to dust you shall return._

She is not a religious person. Her grandmother used to tell her about Buddhism, about nirvana and rebirth of the soul, stories she'd never taken to heart. She's never felt any pull towards God, no matter how He was presented to her. But now, she looks at her hands, and thinks she can see them disintegrate into the wind, blow away like thin sand.

_Shock,_ the piece of her brain that's still functioning whispers. _You're in shock, and overfixating._

Fair enough. Maybe she is. In her defence, it's been a long, gruelling day. She thinks she's _owed_ time to freak out, at this point.

“Was it the first time you killed someone?”

She looks up. Tears her eyes away in an effort that takes just about all the strength she's got left. She thinks she might be shaking. Her ears are ringing.

Villanelle's lost the ugly prison headscarf at some point while they were running. Her hair flows freely down her back, knotted and windswept. It makes her look like some kind of fey creature, some primitive forest spirit, wild and feral. There's a dull blue and purple bruise stretched all over her jaw, a cut high on her cheekbone.

More blood for Eve to look at, coating the woman's skin like some tribal mask.

“I am glad I was there,” Villanelle says. “You did really well.”

“W-what?”

A patient smile, like Villanelle's waiting for her to catch up, indulgent, as though she were addressing a child, and –

_Oh._

_Was it the first time you killed someone?_

And suddenly, Eve wants to hit her. She wants to knock out her teeth. To blacken her eyes. To get some more blood on her hands. She wants to punch the bruises she already has, wants to feel her skin burst under her knuckles until they breaks, she wants –

She bends over and throws up food her stomach doesn't have. She's not eaten in days. The dry, wretched heaves spread from her abdomen to her whole body. Acid burns her throat. She's definitely shaking now.

It passes. She doesn't feel any better.

“Are you all right?”

Villanelle got closer. Not close enough to touch, just enough for the proximity to startle Eve. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve. “Of course I'm not all right,” she says. “I'm in the middle of some – some bloody forest with _you._ Half the KGB's probably on our asses. My life – God, what have I done with my _life._ ”

“FSB,” Villanelle says, with such gravity that Eve pauses. “They're called the FSB now. Are you sure you are a member of the British information services?” There's a strange, dancing glint in her eyes.

“Jesus. You're enjoying this, aren't you?”

She smiles, and Eve hates that it's lovely, even under all the blood and gore. Particularly under all the blood and gore. “We should keep moving,” she says. “Before the sun sets.”

She turns around and walks off. Deeper into the tundra, or whatever it is that this bare, desolate wasteland is called. Eve's not sure what she's supposed to do now, so she follows. She feels numb. Desensitized.

Walking should be easy, she thinks. Walking should help clear her head, bring the world back into focus. It doesn't. Snow crunches under her shoes, and with every step, she can hear bones snap, a wet, terrible sound. Each motion awakens a dull, jarring pain in her side, where the guard's boot hit her, again and again. Right before she drove a kitchen knife between his ribs.

Now _that_ had been easy. Soft flesh giving way, tearing and splinting under hardened steel. Blood bubbling up the corners of a parted mouth, painting her hands in vivid red. She had felt his heart beat, pulse up her fingers, her arms, mesh with the pounding in her own chest, all the way from where she was holding onto the weapon sunk in his body. Holding like she was drowning and the blade was her only lifeline. She had felt his heart stop. Seen his eyes empty, turn blank and glassy.

She can't remember what colour his eyes were.

She thinks with a morbid kind of resignation that she's finally gone mad.

The sun has begun its slow dip behind the horizon. Its bright, colourless rays turn dull red, as though it's about to be struck dead by the same obscurity that's weighing on Eve's shoulders. Overhead, the sky's a gradient of watery blues, purples and pinks, mixing and twisting with the vaporous grey of the occasional cloud. Russia's grand and boundless, magnificent in a way Eve hadn't been expecting. Under the dry, biting cold that's constantly seeping into her skin, crystallizing along her bones, the air is sweet with the smell of winter, frozen green things and woodsmoke.

She hates it. Hates how alert it makes her feel, how free. It's as though the country's insinuating itself within her soul, poking and probing at the lock of a door she hadn't known sat at the center of who she'd thought herself to be.

Villanelle leads the way through the deep green pine forest. The trees are sparse, their barks stripped from the harshness of the seasons, but the forest floor is covered in dry brown needles, the scent of their sap rich in the air. Branches loom overhead, fading sunlight slanting through in pale ribbons that disappear among the thick, twisting network of roots underfoot. Everything creaks, groans and rattles along with the ice-clear wind.

Eve thinks about a Russian myth she's heard, of a witch who dwells deep in the forest, in a hut that stands on chicken legs. She's got a nose so long it drags across the floor when she walks. She's got teeth made of iron. Eve wonders if that's where she's headed. If she's being pulled in by the allure of a sorceress whose house is adorned with the skulls of her enemies. If she's slinking deep into the dark, where she'll get eaten. One more skull to go up the roof of the hut, bone white as snow.

“We will stop here for the night,” Villanelle says, and stops, so abruptly Eve almost collides with her back. She feels body heat for a second, has to keep herself from leaning in.

“I can keep going,” she says. It's gotten dark. She hadn't noticed. The dark blue velvet of the night wraps around her, whispers of things unknown. Far away, stars burn into the blackness of space, countless glimmering silver specks.

“So can I, but I would get lost.” Villanelle drops to the ground without ceremony, back resting against a fallen log, which just about closes the discussion.

“You're telling me you're not lost now?” Eve can't choose between relief and scepticism. She doesn't wait for an answer she knows won't come, sits across from Villanelle, as far away as she can without it looking too –

She doesn't know. Like she's scared of edging closer, maybe. Which she definitely is.

“You should sit by me. To keep warm.”

She snorts. It's loud, and possibly quite rude. She doesn't care. The whole situation is hysterical. She's half-wondering why she's not rolling on the floor, laughing, at this very moment. “Yeah, that's not gonna work.”

The girl has got the gall to pout. “Why did you come to me, if you do not trust me?”

Eve makes a sound with her throat, a low noise that bleeds from her lips, rumbles like gravel. It's the kind of sound she imagines a wounded animal would make. Her chest feels full with something warm and sickly, like it's about to burst open like a swelled balloon.

“I don't trust you,” she says, and hates how it's almost a snarl. “I just, I – ” _I couldn't let you die. God, I could not let you die. The thought of it turned my stomach. I let him die in your stead. Him, and everyone who stood between you and the exit._ There are a thousand arguments, a thousand good reasons for breaking Villanelle out of prison. She went over them with Kenny through more sleepless nights than she cares to count, their heads bent together for hours on end, pushed forward by too much bitter black coffee and not enough food, hushed voices a constant stream around them, smothered into the depths of the dark. These words hiss through her head in a mad chorus, none of them keeping still long enough for her to force it into her mouth.

“Shut up,” she says.

Villanelle hums, mimics zipping her mouth shut, eyes wide with mock earnestness. Both her forearms go to rest on her pulled up knees. She looks perfectly at ease among the swaying trees and the wilderness. There's something like satisfaction in her countenance, in the way she breathes. Like she's savouring the stretch of freedom in her lungs.

Eve wonders what the air tastes like to her. To someone who's spent so much time locked up in the dank gloom of a prison cell, with dirt and piss and iron forever coating the back of her throat.

“Konstantin,” she says instead. “What's your relationship with him?”

Villanelle raises an eyebrow. She unzips her mouth. “Who is Konstantin?”

“Don't. Don't play with me. I know he knows you. I think he's the one who recruited you, all these years ago. I know you've met him.”

“Have _you_ met him?”

“Yes.”

Villanelle rocks forward, calves sliding under her thighs. “We never had sex. You don't need to worry.”

Eve has to swallow around words she'll probably regret uttering, nails digging small crescents into the palms of her hands. She feels like she's talking to a child. A playful, annoying child, needling and teasing to see how much she can push before going to far. Before Eve snaps and starts yelling. She can't raise to the bait if she's to retain a modicum of control over the conversation.

“Is he the one who employs you?” she asks, and somehow keeps her voice level. “Is he part of the Twelve?”

“When did you see him?”

“I – almost as soon as we got to Russia.”

Villanelle leans in, hands laying flat on her thighs, and Eve has the stupid thought that the space between them is shrinking, tunnelling down as the rest of the world fades into nothingness. “And after I killed Nadia?”

She says it like it's nothing. Like killing a woman who had loved her had only been another part of her day. Which Eve supposes, is exactly what it had been. She thinks she ought to feel something about it. Repulsion, maybe, at the indifference in Villanelle's tone. Knowing academically that the woman was a psychopath and seeing it etched into each of her too-still muscles should make for two different experiences. It ought to mean something.

Eve's not all that surprised to note that it doesn't.

“Yes,” she says. “Then, too.”

“Was he alright?”

“Was he al – ” Eve shakes her head. She feels strange, like she's floating a feet outside her own body. “Why? Do you care about him?” She means for it to be dry, a rhetoric question, but it comes out more serious than she'd hoped. Villanelle stays silent, looks at her until she cracks. “Well, he seemed fine? I mean, he wasn't hurt or anything.”

Even from the distance, she can see Villanelle's jaw flex. Her eyes go still, lost somewhere over Eve's shoulder. There's a fixedness to them that reminds Eve of a tiger whose gaze she had crossed at the zoo, the only time she had gone as a kid. It's the hard, deadened stare of a predator, shining hazel and yellow in the dying of the light. It's the first time she stops looking at Eve since the moment they sat down, which really shouldn't be what rattles her.

It only lasts a moment. Villanelle blinks, and it's all gone, vanished like a dream upon waking. Eve thinks she might have woken up, too. From a lifelong haze, into a world that's all blood, snow and hard edges.

“You don't need to worry about Konstantin,” Villanelle says, and this time it sounds like a promise. Like it's meant to be a reassurance. Then, apropos of nothing, she says, “Your smart friend, with the computers. He has a plan to get away from here, yes?”

Eve's tried very hard not to think about Kenny, all the while they were walking. Imagining the boy's panic doesn't help curb her own. “The plan,” she grits out, “went up in smoke the moment you started shooting. We were supposed to have two more minutes before they rang the alarm. But I'm sure he'll figure something out.”

“That is good.” Villanelle leans back against her log, all lazy grace. “Eat some snow,” she says. “To help with the hunger. Then sleep. It's a long walk to Moscow. We will be fine for the night. They will not look for me.”

“Why? They don't want you to be caught by the police?”

“Because I am exceptional.” When Eve doesn't laugh, she rolls her eyes. “Sleep, Eve Polastri. No one is going to kill you tonight.”

Eve doesn't believe she can fall asleep anymore. Not tonight, nor any night to follow. She's tired down to her bones, but there's adrenaline prickling her skin. She shakes in time with her pulse. She thinks she's going to keep existing in this state until the day she dies, the exhausting focus of the hunted forever beating in her breast. She –

She sees pale hands, wet with black blood, grip rusty prison bars. She feels claws tear into the flesh of her back, fangs sink into the nerves of her neck. Kenny looks at her, computer-blue eyes blank and lifeless, a slash dripping red across his stomach. Lips against her throat, fingers carding her hair, hands clenching her thighs. Everything's dark, suffocating with a rich, light-heading perfume. She's arching against a body that isn't there.

When she wakes in the small hours of the morning, half-frozen and ankylosed, dawn glimmering orange and silver over translucent ice, Villanelle is gone.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm in the middle of exam season, so I'm not sure how soon I'll be able to update the next chapter, but hopefully it won't be too long.  
> Lots of love in the meantime!


End file.
